Ten questions to think about the present and try to preconize the future of journalism. We worked on them together with Guido Giraudo, we reasoned with the aim of opening a door on a clearer horizon about how news is first written, then provided and, finally, consumed by the readers.
This issue is anything but irrelevant, basically for two reasons: on one hand, as the numbers of Agicom’s Information Consumption Report prove, what we read is already influenced by Google and Facebook algorithm; on the other the Web forced the media to renounce to relevant quotes of quality and authority in order to monetize thanks to clicks-generating content.
Therefore, short time to write, even less to consider the reliability of a piece on news and little money earned from one’s work.
The counterbalance of all these “minus” is the huge amount of contents to produce and publish every day, rather immediately. So, less and less quality contents and more and more news that would never have got any right to stay, until the age of the smartphones, on the websites of Corriere della sera and La Repubblica (just to mention the most popular ones): Vacchi’s dance, the hair of Ferragni and Fedez, Corona’s ramblings and the tattoo butterfly of Belen.. and I stop here, not to rub salt in the wound.
Here it comes the real need to ask our 10 questions to major experts like Derrik de Kerckhove, Maria Pia Rossignaud, Luisella Costamagna, Luca Rigoni, Marcello Veneziani and others in order to understand, through their considerations, if our life will be more and more oriented by artificial intelligences which are in their turn oriented by someone else. We want to understand, in conclusion, if our 1984 is coming to an end or if, on the contrary, it’s just begun.